Glamour magazine had a long talk with that most glamour lady of all, Munroe Bergdorf. Glamour asks a profound question:
How have you learnt to become at one with yourself in that sense what have been some turning points in your kind of discovery of your sense of self?
In other words tell us more about your Self, which Bergdorf is only too happy to do.
As a trans person you’re forced to find who you are in a world that really doesn’t have any space for you. You’re forced to exist within the world that constantly wants to tear you down and invalidate your feelings, invalidate your identity, invalidate your contributions, invalidate your possibility of having what we would call a normal life or an authentic life.
Well, no. That turns things inside out. Nobody “forces” trans people to do anything; trans people decide that they are different from everyone else and then complain that nothing fits. It’s a bit like saying you identify as having ten feet and then that it’s unfair for shoe stores to expect you to pay for five pairs of shoes instead of one pair.
It’s not really reasonable to claim to live in a way that’s the opposite of the way the vast majority lives and then accuse that vast majority of blocking your ability to have a normal or authentic life.
Does Bergdorf even want a normal life? A male Bergdorf would not be getting all this attention.
As a person of colour, as black person, as a trans person, as a queer person and as a woman, I’ve been navigating a hostile environment my whole life. I do feel like now that we’re all confronted with our phones, much more than we were we’re not distracted. I think that we’re all starting to see exactly what’s wrong with society.
Bergdorf is doing a lot of double-counting there. A person of color and a black person? That’s two points instead of one? And a trans person and a woman? He gets to count both? A man who says he’s a woman gets two disprivilege points where a man who doesn’t say he’s a woman gets none and a woman gets one? When literally speaking a man who says he’s a woman is in fact a man? Is this all just a big con game to accrue points?
Then he explains how feminism is all wrong because it doesn’t center him.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of really unhelpful feminism out there, such as the feminism that J.K.Rowling follows which is called gender critical feminism which believes that trans women are men and that the only women are women that have a uterus. That is awful because a lot of women can’t have children and does that mean that they’re less women because they’re no longer of use? It also doesn’t centre the needs of black women, of sex workers, of the people that really need feminism the most which is the most oppressed cross sections of society. So, I believe that feminism needs to lift up people that are on the front lines when it comes to sexual violence which are people that engage in sex work whether or not that’s for survival or choice, not just sex slavery of sex trafficking. But also, trans women, disabled women, people that are often overlooked within society or have the least rights need the most access to feminism.
Except that trans women are in fact men, and feminism is for and about women, not men, not even men who claim to “feel like” women, men who say they are women, men who “identify as” women, men who claim to think or even know they are women.
I think journalists should stop asking men for their criticisms of feminism. Men do enough of that without prompting.
Comments
16 responses to “Your kind of discovery of your sense of self”
Except that no form of feminism is saying this, and certainly not JKR. Women are women because of a suite of characters more common to mothers than fathers, as Bjarte likes to say, but not all women have everything in the suite. Just as a three-legged dog is still a dog even though dogs are classified as quadrupeds.
And the only thing that should be centered in feminism is women. Yes, black women are part of it. Yes, disabled women are part of it. Yes, female sex workers are part of it. Yes, old and young women, fat and thin women, any women that are women. But feminism needs to center the women, while recognizing the unique problems that come from other axes of oppression. But the focal point, from which all the spokes radiate, needs to be women.
But men who think they are women do not properly belong in feminism. They can make a movement for themselves it they wish, but they prefer to take over other movements, ones that were already successful. Less work that way. Having already colonized LGB, and finding it rather easy to do, they expected feminism to be the same. Just say, hey, here we are, make your movement about us, and we would embrace them with the openest of open arms.
Feminism has proven harder to colonize, and it galls them.
Yep, thence we get “BIPOC”, brown privilege, and brown fragility, because there are hierarchies of oppression within each category. It’s just too bad for Munroe about that light-skinned privilege.
See? Now they’ve got me thinking in terms of bullshit racial categories. Engaging with wokeness makes you think in racist (and sexist) ways, which means that wokeness creates in you the defect it accuses you of.
That is awful because a lot of women can’t have children and does that mean that they’re less women because they’re no longer of use? Do you think that an infertile woman isn’t a woman? No? Then by your definition of women transwomen are women.
As gotchas go, that one is really pathetic.
Which reminds me of something the odious G said over on that blog a couple of months ago. Her big idea that day was something about GC feminists believe that before girls begin puberty they are not female as they don’t menstruate, because that’s the reason GC feminists don’t class transwomen as women. She’s like Poe’s Law personified.
Do you think that a dog that has had two legs amputated is no longer a dog? Then all bipeds are dogs!
AoS, one thing I just noticed about that sentence you italicized…because they are no longer of use. Since no GC feminist I know would suggest that a woman who cannot bear children is not of any use, I suspect this is very revealing. They are showing us what they think of women, and projecting it onto us, and this one is particularly ugly.
And seriously, we are not the ones who refer to “uterus-havers” or “menstruators”. That is a trans way of pretending that men can do those things, because trans.
Any woman who bases her womanhood on menstruation is going to be in for a big surprise some day – usually somewhere in her 50s. But since most women consider their womanhood to be fuller than that, I think most of us will be fine.
It all reminds me of those nitwit evolution deniers: “Oh yeah? Well then, how come there are still monkeys? I bet those perfessers never thought of that one!” (Or the schmoes who think they can dunk on NASA because they watched a YouTube video. It’s armchair quarterbacks all the way down.)
Does Bergdorf really believe that feminists haven’t been thinking, talking, writing, and arguing about these ideas for a very long time now?
Here’s a messy hodgepodge from the article:
So — what is the “idea of gender?” It’s about how you identify, and being who you are. And changing bodies.
A lot of words to say very little.
Anybody who thinks old women are useless must not have children. Wait, is this another self-fulfilling prophecy?
Also, Grandmother Hypothesis all the way.
iknklast, that bit about no longer being of use is rather telling, isn’t it? It actually reminds me of something that PZ said* a while ago about Mary, his wife. To paraphrase, he claimed that once she had produced their offspring her status as a woman was no longer important to him. Such a dedicated feminist, that bloke. Coincidentally I’m sure, this was immediately prior to Mary packing up and driving a thousand miles just after the lockdown was announced in order – according to PZ (not that I doubt him of course!) – to help their daughter look after her toddler for a few months.
* I may be mis-remembering but I’m pretty sure he was responding to a question from one of our intrepid regulars, possibly latsot or Holms.
Hmm. Much as I despise the way PZ treated me and the nonsense he talks these days, that doesn’t sound like him. That is, I can think of an interpretation of it that doesn’t sound as dismissive as that. What is someone’s “status as a woman” anyway? Was he just saying he saw her as a person more than as A Woman? I really doubt he was saying he saw her as a stick or as useless because she’d had the kids already.
@AoS
#3
Who is G? And what blog?
Ophelia, I’m not sure why I put ‘status’; commenting whilst tired, probably. I’ll try to find the relevant comments when I have the time, but I do recall that his phrasing sounded to me to be very dismissive if not downright insulting towards Mary.
Colin, that’ll be Gilliel, a thoroughly unpleasant and dishonest individual who is a longtime regular commenter on PZs blog and one of three or four people who took over Caine’s Affinity blog at FTB when Caine died.
I just had a good old chuckle to myself imagining a bewildered shoe store manager trying to explain themselves to an angry mob: “No, we did not try and make the customer buy five pairs of shoes. Why would we do that? He’s only got two feet” at which point, they would be drowned out by howls of outrage and “transdecapods are decapods!” “Bigot!” etc.
No, it does not mean that. Because the phrase “all A are B” (all people able to be pregnant are women) does not mean “all B are A” (all women can be pregnant). It’s just such a basic failure of logic, but they all fall for it.
Woot, found an example of the “light-skin privilege” variety.
https://mobile.twitter.com/WayVJordan/status/1282131926095200256
Sorry, Munroe, you don’t get to claim black/color oppression anymore.
This ideology is insane.
Colorism is a thing. I didn’t experience it myself, being light-skinned, but I noticed it a little, and my long-estranged birth father, who was dark-skinned, told me about his experiences. “if you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back.”
If I recall correctly, the book “Who Is Black?” by F James Davis talks about this form of discrimination pretty well.